‘Top Gun’ jets into IMAX 3-D: Insight into the conversion

More than a quarter century since “Top Gun” first flew into theaters, eventually grossing more than $350 million worldwide, Maverick, Goose and Iceman are riding back into the danger zone. Tony Scott’s classic 1986 dogfighting actioner will play exclusively in IMAX 3-D for a six-day run prior to its release on Blu-ray.

As the charismatic fighter pilots at the center of the drama set in an elite Navy flight school, Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards may have felt the need for speed, but Legend3D, the digital media technology company that converted the movie to stereo, didn’t. At a presentation late Friday night, Barry Sandrew, the founder, chief creative officer and CTO of the firm, said his team started working on the conversion in August 2011, finishing a full year later on Aug. 9, 2012.

“We worked with Paramount so that we wouldn’t have a release date,” he said. “We didn’t want a release date. We wanted to take our time and actually do this right.”

Doing it right meant spending “an inordinate amount of time” on preproduction, studying the film and creating a “depth score.” Just as a music score augments the action on-screen, “3-D is supposed to enhance the film,” Sandrew said. “It’s supposed to go with the beat of the film, but it’s not supposed to be the film, and we were very careful in making sure that that wasn’t going to happen. We wanted to make it as natural as possible.”

To that end, “Top Gun’s” iconic director, Tony Scott, was intimately involved with the 3-D conversion of his breakout hit. He was skeptical of the technology at first, Sandrew said, but after seeing the first reel in stereo, “he gave us complete creative freedom on the entire thing,” although the helmer did review every reel as it was completed. (Ten days after the conversion was completed, Scott jumped to his death from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro.)

The lengthy production time also allowed San Diego-based Legend3D—which has also worked on the upcoming “Oz the Great and Powerful,” “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Hugo”—to tap the expertise of retired TOPGUN pilots from nearby Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. “We brought them in because we wanted them to screen the aerial photography that we converted,” Sandrew said. “We wanted to make sure that it was natural, it was real.”

In the 20 minutes of footage screened Friday night, the 3-D made the fighter planes look like toys in some of the long shots, but the shots inside the cockpit were quite visceral.

The veterans Legend3D consulted apparently agreed, with one of them telling Sandrew, “‘I want to thank you for reminding me what it feels like to do a barrel roll in an F-14.’” That comment was particularly gratifying, Sandrew said, because “we didn’t want to give people vertigo, but we wanted people to feel like they were actually in those planes, especially during the dogfights.”

The dogfights, though, were easy to convert compared to the classic bar scene in which Maverick and Goose serenade Charlie (Kelly McGillis) with “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” “The audience is focusing on people, so every inch has to be absolutely perfect,” Sandrew said. Indeed, not a hair on Charlie’s head appears disengaged from her lovely face, as can sometimes happen with 3-D conversions.

Legend3D’s attention to detail was so minute that the team inset the highlights in the actors' eyes by “a fraction of a pixel,” Sandrew described. “Now, you may think that’s, well, it’s kind of overkill. And if you look at a lot of converted films, you find that that didn’t happen.

“But the reason we do it is because subliminally, it’s very, very important. If we didn’t do it, you’d probably never notice it. But it really means a lot when you have a close-up because 45 percent of the time, we’re looking at a person’s eyes, and if they don’t look real, if the highlights are on the surface, they might as well be dead.”

Sandrew said that “Top Gun” could never have been shot in stereo. The large rigs required to support 3-D cameras couldn’t have captured either the aerials or the close-ups of the pilots in the cockpits. Moreover, the long lenses Scott used to film the long shots tend to flatten the image, but Legend3D is “lens agnostic. We don’t care what you use.”

“Tony had his own directorial style, and if he had done it in 3-D back in 1986, it would have been a different movie,” Sandrew said.

“Top Gun” plays in 3-D Feb. 8-13 in select IMAX theaters. The Blu-ray 3-D/2-D combo with digital copy comes out on Feb. 19 with special features including filmmaker commentary; a six-part making-of documentary; “Inside the Real Top Gun,” behind-the-scenes and survival-training featurettes; four music videos; and interviews with Cruise.